Cultivating the Sociological Imagination: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Sociology

[...]reading Cultivating the Sociological Imagination feels much like taking first-person advice from the editors and contributors, who not only represent the leading advocates of service learning in higher education, but also share many years of experience in what works and what does not. Marullo ("Sociology's Essential Role: Promoting Critical Analysis in Service Learning") puts it well when he claims that servicelearning pedagogy is an especially good fit with sociology because it helps students "make systematic observations of how social ills are structured through institutional operations and a culture that reinforces them" (p.11). [...]Strand's caution about the "subtle advocacy of personal experience over systematic analysis as a source of information about social problems and social life" (p. 32) embedded in service learning is worth keeping in mind when designing course syllabi.